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It is most often in the context of wars. ethnic / national secessionist struggles, the geopolitical struggle of radical Islamic fundamentalism and the Western world, and drug trafficking, which is a gigantic source of money. Of the four largest wars, three – Afghanistan, Yemen, and Syria – take place in the Islamic world, and the fourth, the war on drugs in Mexico, takes place in the immediate vicinity of the United States, the largest consumer market. of the world.
We get our way cheap
The good news for Hungary in 2020 is that the wars in the Balkans in the 1990s were not repeated, which is not natural for the conflicts examined in other parts of the world.
There are countries like Afghanistan that have not been able to get out of the spiral of violence since the Cold War.
Peace in the Balkans is also worth appreciating because much of the cost of peacekeeping is now covered by our taxes. To be sure, Serbia’s growing arms purchases from Russia are assuming increasingly worrying proportions. However, the presence of NATO and EU peacekeeping forces, including hundreds of Hungarian soldiers, in Bosnia and Kosovo may be a sufficient guarantee that the remaining political differences will not escalate to extremes and will not return to the extreme. armed conflict. The wars that erupted in the wake of the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia have broken out, but two active conflicts in the former Soviet Union have taken their toll this year.
One of the rifts of the Russian-speaking insurgents in the Ukrainian region of Donbass against the Ukrainian central government, which has been reduced to sporadic conflicts this year for the seventh consecutive year.
The other was a somewhat unexpected but unsurprising recurrence of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in September 2020. Unsurprisingly, Azerbaijan has been heavily armed for almost a decade and a half to exact revenge for the defeat suffered by the Armenians and to regain the territories. it lost in the early 1990s. Since Azeris have permanently invested so much money in weapons from oil revenues (US $ 24 billion in 2009-2018) , which has consistently exceeded Armenia’s financial resources, and Turkey has become an increasingly powerful supporter of the Azerbaijani cause over the years, the strategic balance of power shifted this fall. The six-week fighting, which involved between 6,000 and 7,000 dead and the recovery of some of the lost Azerbaijani territories, ended in a ceasefire in November, currently guaranteed by 2,000 Russian peacekeepers.
It is also positive, although it is not known how persistent the trend is, that the four armed conflicts that have claimed the greatest human sacrifice so far will shine at lower temperatures in 2020, which may be related to the spread of the coronavirus. The outbreak of the Covid-19 epidemic certainly had an impact on the drug wars in Mexico and Latin America, with drug closures declining in the spring due to border closures, and street violence logically hampered by the curfew. However, despite all hopes, this effect turned out to be temporary, with recurring gang wars in the fall. and before Christmas the former governor of the Mexican state of Jalisco was also assassinated in a restaurant.
In Afghanistan, however, the situation is more encouraging despite the Christmas bombings: not only because half the people have died this year when the peace talks began in 2019 and in September, but also because they appear to continue in Doha. in january.
The grotesque war
In the last decade, the ithe Syrian war has become a central conflict in the Islamic world however, the contours of its closure are still weak. The 2011 Syrian protests against step by step against the regime of President Bassar al-Assad culminated in one of the bloodiest, most grotesque and powerful games in the Middle East. Over the years, in the revolving stage of the geopolitical panopticon, we have seen the rise and fall of the ruthless Islamic State, the Turkey Regional wings of power, another outbreak of the Kurdish national movement, Moscow’s spectacular Soviet-era military intervention in defense of the Assad regime, the sectarian struggle of Shiite and Sunni Islamic believers, and the impression of a chaotic American strategy.
Meanwhile, Syria’s population of 22 million has been reduced to 17.5 million, and in 2020, 6.6 million Syrian refugees were counted in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq.
The conflict, however, took its toll at a higher rate Since 2002, there have been several Islamic extremist networks in central Africa. Past military interventions by the United States and France have yielded only partial and temporary successes in this increasingly furious, cross-border guerrilla war with a religious mantle that has no winners. One of the centers of the African mutations of the Islamic State and the terrorist organization al-Qaeda is in Mali, from where it spread your activities in Burkina Faso Since the end of 2016, inciting anarchy and violence, forcing half a million people to flee their homes. However, Islamist militants are also active in the Lake Chad basin, but they are also carrying out terrorist attacks in Niger, where six French aid workers were killed in a giraffe park in summer.
In the guerrilla warfare waged by Islamists in the Sahel countries, 4,825 people lost their lives last year, up from 6,700 in 2020. The dangerous trend began when the defeated Islamic State in Syria and Iraq began to be rescued here in West Africa .
Boko Haram, which earned the dubious title of “deadliest terror group” a few years ago, has also been activated in Nigeria and Chad this year. It is not so much the mass kidnapping that took place at the end of the year, which basically ends in release, that should be considered here.but to actions such as the murder of Christians and the establishment of a church at Christmas, or the mass slaughter of soldiers of the Chadian army in the spring. The situation is not better on the other side of the black continent; Not only is Somalia drowning in Islamist terror, it has spread to the gas-rich northern region of the former Portuguese colony of Mozambique.
Like Yugoslavia, it is only five times bigger
In East Africa, ethnic conflict is also part of the instability. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abij Ahmed launched a military offensive against Tigrai, a federal member state in northern Ethiopia, in early November 2020 to prevent further separatist efforts. After a month of fierce fighting, more than 50,000 have sought refuge in Sudan. The operations appeared to have reached a successful resting place before Christmas, but the danger of guerrilla warfare has not yet passed. The disintegration of the most populous country in East Africa poses a serious risk and Ethiopia has been affected by serious internal ethnic conflicts since 1974. The stubborn deepening of ethnic divisions could also lead to the disintegration of a country of some 110 million people, which would be roughly the East African version of Yugoslavia’s disintegration 30 years ago, affecting only five times as many people.
Globally, the best news in 2020 is the failure of the war that many expected in January. And this is onedirect armed conflict between the United States and Iran, which led to the liquidation of theocratic Shiite head of the secret service, Kasim Suleiman, earlier this year it was fine in the air afterwards. Analysts at the prestigious Crisis Group saw the high chances of an open war confrontation in 2020 in the weeks leading up to the assassination, but ultimately fell short. The world is now waiting for more confidence-building measures from the Democratic Administration in Washington, which will take office in 2021, which could bring relief for a time. In the medium term, however, US world power will by all means prevent the regional emergence of a hostile Persian state hostile to it.
(Top Image: BM-30 Szmercs rocket has not exploded Azeri Mingachevir at the hydroelectric power station on September 27, 2020. Photo: Valery Sharifulin / Getty Images Hungary)
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